The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Some network devices, such as network switches, bridges, routers, etc., employ multiple packet processing elements to simultaneously process multiple packets to provide high throughput. For example, a network device may utilize parallel packet processing in which multiple packet processing elements simultaneously and in parallel perform processing of different packets. In other network devices, a pipeline architecture employs sequentially arranged packet processing elements such that different packet processing elements in the pipeline may be processing different packets at a given time.